10th National Assembly Leadership Polls: Random thoughts
By Tiko Okoye
Russian political leader and Premier of the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Nikita Khrushchev was the first Soviet head of government to pay a state visit to the United States of America less than a month to the 1960 presidential election that pitted a freshman Democratic senator with a great personal charisma (John F. Kennedy) against a sitting Republican vice president (Richard M. Nixon) during the build-up towards the zenith of the Cold War. American journalists thought they had their ‘prey’ well-cornered when they condescendingly sought to affirm which of Communist politicians and democratic, freedom-espousing Western politicians stood head and shoulders above the other.
Khrushchev left them gasping in astonishment with a wry tragicomedy about the universal character of politicians. Said he: “Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.” Yours truly was reminded of this poignant comment as I reflected on developments in the polity since the February 25 presidential poll and why majority of Nigerians, including those who ought to know better, refuse to acknowledge that our politicians are all ‘5 & 6,’ as we say in these parts.
These ‘unbelievers’ would rather opt to mealy-mouth the attention-grabbing hoopla of “Your criminal is worse than our saint” – not until I equally recollected the maxim of Irish-born English novelist and poet Oscar Wilde’s to the effect that “The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past (his insights stem from his experience as a sinner) and every sinner has a future (opportunity for redemption and restitution)”? There was more than sufficient melodrama in the course of elections of principal officers in the National Assembly to equate Khrushchev with Nostradamus.
But let me first categorically state upfront that the post of Senate President should have been allotted to the South-East, not the South-South. There is this notion that the South-East contributed next to nothing to Bola Tinubu’s victory. While this may be true, there are equally other factors that play a huge role in building a nation-state, else we might just be confirming the postulation of American journalist and humorist Franklin P. Adams: “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organisation of hatreds.” I remain fully persuaded that the counsel of Third US President Thomas Jefferson is more germane in our case: “If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.”
Justifying the marginalisation of Ndigbo in the political firmament on the ground that they are the ones making poor political choices will not suffice. Ndigbo witnessed gruesome murders of their kith and kin in the 1966 pogrom. Those who barely survived the Civil War were completely deceived by the “No Victor, No Vanquished’ clichéd sloganeering at the end of the costly Civil War, given the financial enslavement that immediately followed. For decades, there wasn’t a significant federal presence in Igboland. The foregoing and more convinced Ndigbo that there’s an unwritten but official state policy to leave them totally in the cold in a nation where they are most likely the most populous ethnic nationality, if an accurate census were to be conducted. It’s only logical that for other ethnic nationalities to squarely deal with this sense of frustration and betrayal deeply etched in the hearts of Ndigbo, they must figuratively put themselves in their shoes to know where and how they pinch.
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The Holy Book exhorts all of us to “be of one mind, empathizing with each other, loving each other as brothers and sisters; being tender-hearted and keeping a humble attitude; never repaying evil for evil and retaliating with insults when others insult us; instead, paying them back with a blessing” (1 Peter 3:8-9). President Bola Tinubu has commendably hit the ground running but how I wish he could’ve used the power of his office to ensure that the third leg of the tripod on which Nigeria perches is maintained in the best possible working condition. “As the master politician navigates the ship of state,” bellowed one-time US Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall, “he both creates and responds to public opinion. Adept at tacking with the wind, he also succeeds, at times, in generating breezes of his own.” There’s no greater heart-warming breeze that Tinubu would’ve generated for now than influencing the zoning of the Senate Presidency – the third most powerful political office – to the South-East.
Quite interestingly, as proof of the vindictive politics our political elite typically play, in the contest for Senate President, more than 70 percent of the senators-elect from the South-South shunned their fellow Niger-Deltan and Christian – Godswill Akpabio – in favour of a Northern ultra-fundamentalist Muslim – Abdulaziz Yari – regardless of how repugnant having Muslims head all top-five offices in the country would seem to be. So much for the furore over ethnic and religious balancing by those claiming to be victims.
And what can be said of the oft-over-exuberant enfant terrible representing Adamawa South in the Senate, Elisha Aboh? Here’s a man who defected from APC to PDP, in righteous indignation, ostensibly on the grounds that the party’s Muslim-Muslim ticket was a monstrous assault on the religious sensibilities of Christians. But as soon as push turned to shove, our modern-day crusading Knight Templar saw nothing wrong or contradictory in being the principal proposer of Yari, who, while preaching tongue-in-cheek that it would be apocalyptic to have “Southerners heading all arms of government,” was openly screaming that the heavens won’t fall even if all NASS principal officers, along with the President and Vice President are Muslims, making one wonder why Aboh was viscerally opposed to Tinubu and the APC in the first place!
After Akpabio bested Yari, he reportedly walked to where Yari was sitting to hug him amidst enthusiastic clapping by fellow senators as a sign of their approval of the ‘No victor, no vanquished’ gesture. But Tinubu and APC mustn’t be fooled. Every action has consequences and proper sanctions must be meted to failed coup plotters to discourage wannabes.
Yari is nobody’s fool. He did his homework very well. His permutations and combinations reassured him that his prospects for victory were indeed very bright if he could only kill a bird (win the contest) with two well-aimed projectiles. First was getting the PDP to queue behind him – and appointing PDP stalwarts to head different sections of his campaign effort was one way to partially achieve that. Second was his willingness to incite and provoke the freshmen class of the 10th Senate – constituting about 70 percent – to prove a point with their numerical superiority by rebelling against the standing rule that bars them from being eligible candidates for such offices, with him, a first-time senator, as the principal beneficiary.
Apart from countermanding a standing order of the Senate, the chairman of his media campaign committee, Sen. Abdul Ningi (Bauchi Central), is a PDP foundation member and top gun. Yari was obviously not just content with defying his party’s directive on zoning – which doesn’t augur well for his future prospects within the APC – but, worse still, and thumbing his nose at the Senate, but he was also bent on bringing down APC to its knees by replicating the events of 2015 masterminded by Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara, as long as he achieved his objective because at the end of it all, he has other parties to defect to. It even beggars belief that such an irredeemably-reflexive chief lawbreaker would want to be the nation’s chief lawmaker!
I’m touched by the argument that we mustn’t dismiss the advice Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) disclosed his father, Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), gave him in the cinematic version of Mario Puzo’s classic novel “The Godfather Part II:” “Keep your friends close and your enemies (even) closer.” There might indeed be some profit in keeping an unrepentant rabble-rouser where you can nip whatever he’s hatching in the bud, but I’ll rather vote for the equally poignant declaration of Latin writer Publilius Syrus: “There is no (assured) safety in regaining the favour of an enemy.”
It was also during this period that a party that insisted that its same-faith ticket is as innocent and harmless as a newly-laid egg started insisting that the Senate President must be a Christian in order to achieve “equity and religious balancing.” You wonder why they still insisted on a Muslim-Muslim pairing if they knew this all along. On the other hand, parties that leveraged on their opponent’s same-faith ticket to fan a ‘religious war’ that proved to be very advantageous ironically no longer saw anything wrong with Muslims occupying all top executive, legislative and judicial arms of government, going by the voting instructions they handed down to their members!
It was an open season for duplicity, hypocrisy, insincerity and do-as-we-say-but-not-as-we-do! But who will tell their expendable foot soldiers that they’re just sacrificing their well-being and lives for a lost cause, and will they even be willing and able to see and perceive, hear and understand? As the refrain of that old Negro spiritual posits: “The answer is definitely blowing in the wind.”